The Italian patent and trademark office recently approved a patent application about an innovative apparatus for acquiring a plurality of surface images of at least one body and related methods. The invention, which is the result of a cooperation between the Department of Engineering, Mondial Marmi Srl and colleagues from the University of Vigo (Spain) is composed of optical means for image acquisition and one dome-shaped illuminator provided with one inferior basement to integrally hold the object to acquire. On top of the dome is a rotatable device for revolving the optical means about a rotation axis in a controlled manner. The apparatus is particularly suitable for acquiring images of industrial and hand-made products such as - but not limited to - natural stone, wood, ceramics, textiles, etc.

The tumour-stroma ratio (TSR) is an independent prognostic factor in a wide number of oncologic diseases. Accurate and reproducible estimation of TSR therefore plays a central role in patient stratification and follow-up. The use of features directly related to human perception makes it possible to evaluate the tissue's appearance on the basis of a set of meaningful parameters. In this work we proposed and evaluated the capability of the following five visual features to correctly discriminate epithelium from stroma in digitised tissue micro-arrays of colorectal cancer: coarseness, contrast, directionality, line-likeliness and roughness. The experiments demonstrated that the proposed approach can correctly discriminate epithelium from stroma with state-of-the-art accuracy.